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Originally Posted by Harmon
In the music industry, for example, what seems to be happening among the kids who make very little by way of profit from sale of recorded music is that they make money selling "merch." (Which spellcheck wants me to correct to "mercy," perhaps not without reason...)
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Wouldn't it have been easier to just write merchandise than that whole sentence in bold?
Speaking of merchandise, I have a little cousin that just turned 3. For Christmas, he received nothing but Thomas the Engine themed stuff, from pajamas to books to toy tools. Ditto for his birthday a week ago. He probably got several hundred dollars worth of Thomas the Engine merchandise. In general, the entertainment industry makes more from merch than content sales. From
The Economist
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The global market for children's TV programmes is worth about $2 billion, according to Informa Media, a research group. But the market for licensed toys alone is worth some $27 billion. Throw in all the other branded items, from birthday cards to video games, and the market for children's licensed products is worth some $132 billion...
Three years ago, 98% of the revenue at HIT Entertainment, a British firm that owns “Bob the Builder”, “Barney” and other children's TV characters, derived from television. Last year, this share had shrunk to 19%, with the remainder coming from consumer products, home video and stage shows. “Bob the Builder” is now hammering his way into living-rooms in 140 countries, from Japan to America. “We are creative producers, but we are also now brand managers,” says Charlie Caminada, head of sales and marketing at HIT.
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http://www.economist.com/node/1124311
http://www.cracked.com/article_19012...s-suck_p2.html
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Originally Posted by Harmon
If you assume a dynamic economy - aka "reality," - then profits will be reduced for some, eliminated for others, and increased for some. It's just that we don't immediately see how profits will be increased. But there is some glimmer of what will happen.
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Every new advance in technology has created a moral panic--that this technology represented an imminent threat to the creative industry. The movie projector was supposed to be the end of live performance (revenues for theatre performance are greater than revenues for Hollywood ticket sales), radio and CDs were supposed to destroy the music industry (instead they created opportunities for more artists to make a living), video recorders and cable were supposed to destroy the movie industry (if you believe Jack Valenti), and now the internet is the creative content apocalypse, even though the entertainment industry consistently outperforms the overall economy, in spite of the fact that wages are falling and consumers desire to save more.
